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Not for the Faint of Heart or Lazy of Thought

EACH year my favorite films shift depending on the day, the hour, the minute. Recently, fond memories of a few bite-size favorites were supplanted by fonder recollections of Guy Maddin’s nuttily wonderful “Brand Upon the Brain!,” which I watched in a 1913 movie palace while attending the Toronto International Film Festival. (It later played as part of the New York Film Festival.) Generational anomie of a very American independent sort had been pushed aside by Mr. Maddin’s homage to silent cinema with its live narration, full orchestra, three Foley artists and a castrato in a fur hat.

As delightful as “Brand Upon the Brain!” is, this was a disappointing year, partly because there was nothing as sublime as Terrence Malick’s “New World,” as thrilling as David Cronenberg’s “History of Violence.” The big studio offerings included the usual mixed bag of pricey schlock (“The Da Vinci Code”), deflated pop (“Superman Returns”) and garbage (“Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties”). The studio dependents seemed more timid than ever, with few, outside Sony Pictures Classics, even bothering to release foreign-language films. Though some smaller distributors stepped up with the goods (“Half Nelson”), not enough filmgoers bothered to go to the theater. It would be nice to think that the missing art-house audience will catch up with “Duck Season” on DVD, but I wonder.

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Lino Ventura, left, as a member of the French Resistance, in Jean-Pierre Melvilles Army of Shadows, based on Joseph Kessels 1943 novel.Credit
Rialto Pictures

If not for Clint Eastwood and Alfonso Cuarón, this drab holiday season would be a washout. Increasingly, film companies are cramming their best Oscar bets into December, a scenario that benefits no one, including the filmmakers and their audiences. It’s particularly instructive to watch the studios attempt to win favor with critics, whom they tend to treat with contempt the rest of the year. In Los Angeles, where I live, that contempt is in full evidence at press screenings where attendees are routinely wanded and their belongings searched. It’s not supposed to be personal, even when strangers order you to stand with your arms and legs outstretched so you can be wanded. Happily, I saw the best film of the year in New York:Originally released in France in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece, “Army of Shadows,” received its American theatrical release this year thanks to the invaluable programmer and distributor Bruce Goldstein, who makes Film Forum one of New York’s most important destinations. Mr. Melville based the film on Joseph Kessel’s 1943 French Resistance novel and on his own experience fighting in the Maquis, which probably explains why he painted the story a darker shade than did the original author. Writing during the war, Mr. Kessel needed hope. Many years later, Mr. Melville could afford to express his pessimism through an austere mise-en-scène in which Resistance fighters carry the shame of a nation on their squared shoulders, and a man’s fallen hat rocks on a cobblestone street, an allusion to the head that will soon roll.

Clint Eastwood’s "Letters From Iwo Jima” confirms his reputation as one of the greatest directors working today, and one of the few for whom filmmaking is a moral imperative. As dark in palette and heart as “Army of Shadows,” and as thoroughly and bracingly stripped of sentimentality, Mr. Eastwood’s film takes us inside the shadowy caves of Iwo Jima, where Japanese soldiers battle against the same American soldiers represented in the director’s “Flags of Our Fathers.” In “Iwo Jima,” Mr. Eastwood humanizes the Japanese without evading their barbarism; rather shockingly, neither does he flinch when it comes to the Americans. Here, historical enemies turn into human beings, and then they die and die and die and die, becoming yet another army of shadows.

David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” isn’t for the faint of heart or lazy of thought, notably those for whom moviegoing is simply a more socially acceptable version of sucking on a pacifier. Like the Austrian documentary “Our Daily Bread,” the film makes for harrowing, demanding, sometimes unpleasant and insistently engaged viewing, but it’s also mysterious and exciting to think about. It recalls what the filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas said in the early 1960s about avant-garde films he called Baudelairean: “It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.” That more or less says it all, superbly.

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A crop-duster sprays insecticides on a field of sunflowers in a scene from the documentary Our Daily Bread, directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Credit
First Run/Icarus Films

Admirers of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” will find much to appreciate in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s“Our Daily Bread.” Yet what makes this remarkable film about industrial food production among this year’s best isn’t its sometimes shocking subject matter, but its formal rigor. This year’s crop of nonfiction titles included PowerPoint presentations, cut-and-paste news reports and the usual exercises in dithering solipsism, precious few of which were well considered, shot and edited. The relative cheapness of digital video has been a boon to documentary film (really, video) makers, who can now shoot miles of badly composed imagery and, if the subject matter is zingy or exploitative enough, earn credit where none is due. “Our Daily Bread” is a vivid reminder that aesthetics are part of the documentary ethos, not added value.

Directed and written by the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, “L’Enfant” keeps close watch as an amoral young thief becomes a man of conscience. The urgency of the filmmaking and the shocking setup — the thief sells his newborn son for money — give “L’Enfant” the feel of a thriller and the heft of a Bible story. Despite that heaviness and the seemingly unforgivable nature of the crime, the film moves fast and feels fleet, partly because the thief spends much of the story running from the cops, from his marks, from himself. There is much to cherish in the film, including the obvious fact that the Dardennes are not interested in right versus wrong; they are, rather, concerned with humanity, including their own.

The people over at Universal Pictures, who have decided to open “Children of Men” on Christmas Day, either have a seriously wicked sense of humor or (my guess) don’t think this story about the end of the world stands a chance among the other holiday offerings. That’s too bad. The film certainly sounds like a downer — with no more children being born, human beings are staring into the abyss of their own future — but so does “Blade Runner.” Brilliantly directed by Alfonso Cuarón, “Children of Men” won’t connect with those audiences who like their dystopian fictions to end with a family hug, but there’s lots to love and respect here, starting with the genius of Mr. Cuarón’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki.

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Laura Dern in a scene from David Lynchs Inland Empire.Credit
Studio Canal

In “Three Times,” which traces love across three different time frames, the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien recombines themes, textures and moods from several of his earlier features. The film’s first section, “A Time for Love,” which takes place in the mid-1960s and features the hypnotic repetition of the song “Rain and Tears,” is a masterwork in miniature. One of the pleasures of Mr. Hou’s visual style, the deliberation with which he moves the camera and cuts his scenes together, is that it allows you to really enter the story with the characters, so you can fall in love alongside them. The characters barely seem to be looking at each other, but Mr. Hou’s camera misses nothing.

Michael Mann doesn’t always receive the critical respect he deserves, partly because he likes to make genre films; maybe if he had hired Jack Nicholson to run around with Crockett and Tubbs he might have at least seduced the audience. Glorious entertainment, “Miami Vice” is a gorgeous, shimmering object, and it made me think more about how new technologies are irrevocably changing our sense of what movies look like than any film I’ve seen this year. Partly shot using a Viper FilmStream camera, the film shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.

Mr. Maddin’s “Brand Upon the Brain!” and Sacha Baron Cohen’s merciless “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” round out my list. Mr. Baron Cohen’s comedy has provoked some amusing huffing and puffing from detractors, along with a handful of lawsuits. One common complaint about the film is that it is mean. So it is; so are the Three Stooges. But unlike Larry, Curly and Moe. Mr. Baron Cohen mixes some savage political critique in with his high jinks and mischief. Not long ago, a newspaper reporter, who apparently needed to be dispatched from Kazakhstan to Austria to actually watch “Borat,” declared it “the film of the year” as well as “cruelly anti-American.” Cruel, but fair.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Not for the Faint of Heart or Lazy of Thought. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe